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upstart writes:

Continental pirouettes: Supervolcano fed from Earth's mantle caused crustal plates to rotate:

According to the paper, a super volcano split the Earth's crust over a length of 7,500 kilometers, pushing the Indian Plate away from the African Plate. The cause was a "plume" in the Earth's mantle, i.e. a surge of hot material that welled upwards like an atomic mushroom cloud in super slow motion. It has long been known that the Indian landmass thus made its way northward and bumped into Eurasia. But a seemingly counterintuitive east-west movement of the continental plates was also part of the process. This is supported by calculations by a team led by Dutch scientist Douwe van Hinsbergen (Utrecht University) and by Bernhard Steinberger (GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences).

According to the findings, the Indian Plate did not simply move away from Africa, but rotated in the process. The reason for this is the subcontinent, whose land mass acts on the much larger continental plate like an axis around which the entire plate rotates. In the south, the scissors opened, in the north they closed—there, mountain-building processes and the subduction of crustal plates were induced.

Journal Reference:
Douwe J. J. van Hinsbergen, Bernhard Steinberger, Carl Guilmette, et al. A record of plume-induced plate rotation triggering subduction initiation, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00780-7)

Original Submission